The Magnificent Ambersons

In my quest to watch all of Orson Welles’ work, I’ve taken for granted the idea that his filmmaking trickery was always there. I mean, technically it was, as his first movie was Citizen Kane, and it established so many filmmaking tricks we take as basic nowadays. These tendencies and signatures stood out like a white whale on a background in movies like Kane, Touch Of Evil, or The Lady From Shanghai. Some of those things are on display in The Magnificent Ambersons, but they’re never as in your face as they are in his other movies. The side-lighting, the unusual choices of lenses and focus, it’s here, but it’s muted. The use of his directorial signatures (such as signatures can be established on a second movie) is muted. They’re accent pieces, not fundamental components that sit in the drivers seat with the narrative itself. It makes sense for a movie that is a family drama instead of a fiery pseudo-biography like Kane, but I can’t help feeling like it also makes the movie feel a little more run of the mill. It comes off dry and distant. That may also be because of the characters are the story, or more specifically, character. The movie centers on George Amberson Minafer, the only child of the richest people in town. George is a rotten, unsympathetic, caustic, spoiled brat. He resents an old friend of his mother’s visiting, and gets especially angry when he courts her following George’s father’s death. He tries to court the same man’s daughter, but is constantly crass and blunt, doing nothing to endear himself to her. He torments his aunt and uncle, and generally is an entitled punk. It is through his unjustified entitlement and miserable countenance, as well as the burgeoning industry of the automobile, that his family is brought to ruin. It can be somewhat hard to swallow watching this crocodile of a human being make everyone around him miserable and bringing his family to ruin, because nobody around him deserves the fate he has inflicted upon them. They all seem like good people, and he is the proverbial turd in the punchbowl. I’m not saying it isn’t a well made movie, or isn’t well acted, or anything; it is all that. It’s just so relentlessly miserable, it kept me at arms length. I appreciate it more than I enjoy it. However, I do have to go to bat for something I’ve seen pilloried in a number of places, and that’s the ending. Against Welles’ wishes, the studio filmed a different ending; instead of closing on George penniless and miserable, it has a “happy” ending; the man who had courted his mother, whom he had tormented and refused to let see her on her deathbed, pays for George’s hospital room and provides him financial security. Many have decried the ending as sappy and taking the sting out of George’s comeuppance. I think that misses the point. I think the ending fits, in more ways than one. The movie goes to great lengths to show George as a young man of misplaced pride and youthful recalcitrance. In the end, to have to ask for forgiveness and accept the help of another man — a man whom he made life miserable for — it’s the ultimate loss of face for George. It only underscores the misery he’s brought upon himself. Simultaneously, I think it helps with the movie’s theme about the changing of the world and small towns in the face of the automobile expanding the horizon of America. The movie insinuates that the Ambersons were old money, rooted in old ways, and the Morgans, who are making their fortune in automobiles, are new money. But, as we’ve all seen, the 1% take care of their own. The upper class, especially in the gilded age of the early 20th century, were too important to fail. The Morgans rescuing George and his aunt, preventing them from falling out of high society, shows that while the names and faces of who has the biggest bank accounts may change, they are each other’s safety net. I think this movie would appeal more to those with a penchant for this kind of epic family drama. It didn’t click with me as much as I thought as hoping. I’d still recommend it, as it is historical and well executed. I just wouldn’t make this the first Welles movie you watch.